Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately? – Ford on Cars as Search Engines

Today's MediaPost column is excerpted from my Ford interviews at CES. This week I'll also post the full videos and transcripts.

Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately?

YOU MAY be used to using your phone as a search engine, and you've
seen ideas for years about your TV serving as a search engine, but have you
thought about your car as a search engine?

The idea had occurred to me before. Fittingly, the last section ofmy
final column of 2008 noted one trend to watch this year is that "your
car engine's your search engine." I wrote, "Then there's vehicle
telematics — anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drugstore
via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be."

Ford Motor Company has an even more ambitious vision for the
future of in-car search engines. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas
last week, I met a number of executives from Ford at Social Media Club's
Ultimate Blogger Dinner, including CEO
Alan Mulally. I seized the chance to record video interviews with Ford's
President of the Americas Mark Fields and Director of Connected Services Doug
VanDagens. The full interviews, including text and video, will soon run on my
blog, but I've excerpted segments with VanDagens that address how consumers
search from their cars.

David
Berkowitz: Do you want to share what you're doing?

Doug
VanDagens: I'm the director of connected services, so
I'm responsible for connecting our vehicles with all the services off-board —
satellite radio, an Internet connection, HD radio, things along those lines. So
we've got a whole host of awesome services, some that we've just announced back
in December.

What we're announcing here at the show is an ability to connect to
the Internet through a normal voice plan. So all you need is your phone, and we
can take Sync
through Bluetooth, connect to your phone, and connect out to Tellme, which is a
best-in-class voice portal, and Microsoft now owns those assets. From there we
can direct you to a number of Internet data sources. We can send the GPS information
from the vehicle, we can send diagnostic information over your voice plan, and
then we have traffic, directions, business search, and information, all
Internet-based.

DB: So have
you done some initial testing to see how people are already using this — or is
this really just rolling off the shelves now?

DV:
It's just rolling off… It will be available in the spring, but the coolest
thing about it is, it's going to be available on every new vehicle we're going
to make in 2009, from the Focus to the high-end cars.

You'll have access to Internet information. You can personalize
it. If you want news you can go in and say, "I want technology news,"
"I want business news." It'll be read to you. You can get sports,
news, weather. Later this year we're going to introduce movies and stock
prices.

You can get navigation information, so you can go out and say,
"Find me the closest Starbucks," and it will go out, based on your
location, and find the closest Starbucks to you, analyze the traffic
conditions, tell you how to get there the fastest way, and download the
directions to your car. The call will end, and now you'll get turn-by-turn
directions. It will say, "Turn right at 200 yards," "Turn right
now," it will take you anywhere you want to go. It will do business search
— you can get the phone number. And all of this is free for three years.

DB: Does
this work in conjunction with GPS or more as a replacement?

DV: We
use GPS in the vehicles. Starting in January, all of our new vehicles will have
GPS. So we send the location from the car so we know where you are. You can say
things like, "Search nearby," and they'll find anything that you want
nearby. You can do a business search, you can do it by category, you can do it
by actual business name, by proximity. So you can say, "Find me an Italian
restaurant."

DV: We
are fast to the market. We just got the first version of this over Christmas.
So we took it out and we've been running with it and it works great.

DB: The car
was one of the few places people couldn't readily search before, and search is
so ingrained in people's lives. How do you think your new service is playing
into that fact? How might this change consumer behavior?

DV: I
think the first thing it does is, it makes it safer to drive your vehicle.
Right now when people want to find a place to go or use their phone or an MP3
player, they're doing it anyway. They're looking down and dialing. This makes
your car safer to use because if you need to find a place to go, it will
automatically do it through voice. Our priority is voice. You can just talk to
it, keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road, and you get the
information you need. That's the first thing it'll do.

The second thing it'll do is it will make access to information
that you need fun. You can get the latest technology news. You can personalize
your sports, you can personalize the weather. So it makes the driving
experience fun and safe.